An adventure-documentary cameraman who went on a test dive in the Titan submersible revealed that OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, the creator of the vessel, made a strange comment when the latter raised questions about what would happen in an emergency.
Brian Weed, a well-known camera person working for Discovery Channel's "Expedition Unknown", had gone on a test dive on the sub led by Rush to the Titanic shipwreck site along with show host Josh Gates in May 2021.
During the dive, Weed asked Rush what would happen if the vessel had to suddenly make an ascent in an emergency situation and was nowhere near its mothership.
Weed told Insider that Rush had said, "Well, there's four or five days of oxygen on board” and when Weed asked, 'What if they don't find you?” to which he replied, “Well, you're dead anyway."
He added that Rush's whole point was: "If you're out there, and they don't find you in that many days, you're just going to die anyway — it's over for you, so what does it matter if you can't get out of the sub on your own."
The CEO’s cavalier attitude towards life and death out in the middle of the ocean made Weed feel uneasy, he told Insider.
And indeed, the test dive was plagued with mechanical and communications issues.
According to Weed, they spent two hours going nowhere because they had no power to get down to their target in Puget Sound in the depths of the North Atlantic.
“The whole time I’m in the water locked in this [submersible] and thinking this is supposed to go to the Titanic in two months,” Weed told Insider.
They had to later abort the test trip.
Stockton Rush was also one among the five passengers who died in the catastrophic implosion of the Titan submersible vessel which went missing on June 18 during a trip to the Titanic wreckage in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Meanwhile, Weed eventually dropped the documentary project on the dive over safety concerns, and the "Expedition Unknown" production was also later called off.
Weed wasn't the first or last person to feel uncomfortable about the CEO-creator of the submersible. Videographer Jaden Pan had told the BBC that Rush had suggested sleeping in the sub after the battery went “kaput.”